Cocktails, Apple conundrums, taxes and other assorted stuff

The Tired Donkey

The Tired Donkey blogs about cocktails, ways to get the most out of your Mac at home, work, college . . . wherever. He used to write about the unending abuse suffered by the 51% of Americans who actually pay the federal income tax. But this became too depressing, and, frankly, no one wanted to read it.

Nevertheless, if you came here looking for the Tired Donkey's brilliant analysis of our dim-witted tax system, you can still find his earlier posts. Just check the archives or the Site Map.

Note: The Tired Donkey is not advertiser supported, and he gets no benefit from any product mentioned on his site.

I’m sick of going into places that claim to be bars and having the people who call themselves bartenders not know how to make a Martini. I’m not talking about some goddamn craft cocktail with nine ingredients including a garnish from an Abyssinian coconut. Just a Martini. Everyone—whether you are a bartender or not—should know how not to ruin this simple, delicious drink.

When I say a Martini, I am, of course, talking about a gin Martini. Vodka is a drink for people who don’t like alcohol, a neutral spirit purposefully designed to have no flavor aside from the alcoholic burn. If you want vodka, I can’t stop you from drinking it, but I can recommend against it. Consider yourself warned.

The classic gin Martini has only two primary ingredients: dry (white) vermouth and gin. What the hell is dry vermouth, you ask? A fortified (meaning extra alcohol) wine aromatized with herbs and spices. There are many brands but get Dolin. It’s delicious and quite reasonably priced. After you open it, keep it in the refrigerator and throw it out after six weeks if you don’t drink it all; it will go bad.

As an aside, there is also sweet (red) vermouth, a magical ingredient that’s critical to many spectacular cocktails. Sweet vermouth lasts longer in the refrigerator, and I find it fine for up to six months (although a bottle never lasts that long in my house).

For this drink—as with every other drink—the quality of your ingredients matter, so get good gin. What is “good” gin? I like Bombay Sapphire best, but there are dozens of choices here. Experiment; it will be fun.

I’m not going to be dogmatic about the gin/vermouth proportions because what matters most is how it tastes to you. Not sure? Experiment; it will be fun. The classic proportions are two parts gin to one part vermouth, and a “part” is normally an ounce. Not sure how to measure an ounce? Get a few of these nifty little measuring cups and never guess again. I like mine with a significantly higher proportion of gin, but your taste will vary. It’s said that Winston Churchill felt he got enough vermouth in his Martini by glancing toward France, but a Martini with no vermouth is just a glass of cold gin. Nothing wrong with a glass of cold gin, but it’s not a Martini.

Now you’re almost ready to make your Martini, but you must consider two other ingredients: your garnish and whether or not you are going add a dash of orange bitters.

I garnish with a lemon twist. A twist is a piece of the lemon rind that DOES NOT INCLUDE ANY LEMON PITH OR PULP. Slice off the piece of rind (you can use a special tool if you want, but a sharp knife will work just fine) and then twist it over the finished Martini to release the essential oils before dropping it into the drink. If your twist includes any of the lemon pulp—as they do in many crap bars—your drink will be ruined. Like olives instead? Fine. But make sure they are chilled so you are not dropping a little warm bomb into an icy glass of gin/vermouth perfection.

I don’t use any orange bitters, but try one with a few drops sometime; you may love it that way, and it’s not sacrilege to add it. In fact, there are many purists who will claim a drink without bitters of some kind is not a cocktail at all.

One more decision: to shake or to stir? There are entire web pages devoted to this question, and you can peruse them if you want. But here are few considerations: shaking will make it colder but will also add more water to the mix and has the potential to cloud the drink. Despite the fact that it is not the traditionally accepted way to make a Martini, I like mine shaken because the cold jolt is part of the joy of this cocktail to me. You may prefer yours stirred. Experiment; it will be fun.

So now to making the drink. Measure your gin and vermouth into a glass or a shaker. Add ice. Make it cold by stirring vigorously or shaking. Pour into a chilled Martini glass. Add the orange bitters if you want. Add your garnish of choice. Enjoy.

As autumn approaches, the Tired Donkey is really looking forward to the new Brooks Brothers catalog. Why? Because last year’s catalog was so unintentionally, uproariously funny. The Tired Donkey must admit that the original did not contain dialogue and captions and storyboard panels, but the whole story was in there, just waiting to get out. And now it’s been released from its cold, WASPy prison. Click the picture of the front cover to the left and enjoy the whole story.

Despite his great wisdom on the matter, the Tired Donkey swore off writing about taxes long ago because (1) of the thousands of visitors his blog gets every month, about two of them look at his tax-related posts, and (2) writing about our tax system became so depressing that the Tired Donkey nearly expired. Unfortunately, the recent brouhaha over the debt ceiling and a run of staggering stupidity at the New York Times is forcing the Tired Donkey to come out of tax retirement. So here we go. The Tired Donkey will try to make it brief.On the day after the announcement of the debt ceiling deal, the New York Times’ editorial page, under the headline “To Escape Chaos, a Terrible Deal,” opined that the Democrats “held out for a few basic principles.” Among these, the paper observed, was the principle that there “must be new tax revenues in the mix so that the wealthy bear a share of the burden . . .” Hmmm. A share of the burden? Let’s check that out. Read More . . .

I wrote about the Net Neutrality debate back in August, and it’s time for an update because you are being lied to on a daily basis by the people who control your access to the Internet. It’s time to get educated.First, the basics. Last year a federal court of appeals in Washington, D.C., declared that the FCC lacked the authority to prevent Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from restricting the websites their customers could visit. That’s a big deal if you care about an open internet.

An analogy here should be useful. As hackneyed as it is, imagine the internet as a highway over which information flows. The only way you can access any of that information is via an an off-ramp, and the ISPs own all of them. Get your internet from Comcast? You’re at the end of a Comcast off-ramp. The traffic on the highway below you, like the traffic on the internet, flows unimpeded regardless of rules governing the on-ramps and off-ramps. But you can’t access any of it without your off-ramp controller (your ISP), and they are fighting as hard as they can to be allowed to make decisions about what you are and are not allowed to see. Read More . . .

Is your Mac feeling slow? Does iTunes take forever to start up? Do programs that used to feel snappy suddenly feel like they are running on a virus-clogged Windows machine? Then this is the post for you, with one caveat: if you came here looking for hardware-based fixes for a slow Mac like additional RAM, faster hard drives or new video cards, this is not the post for you. But you might learn something useful anyway.Slow Mac issues are generally caused by one of three things: RAM over-utilization, too little free space on your hard drive or various, esoteric issues with system permissions and the like. It is undeniable that two of these three could almost certainly be helped by hardware upgrades, but it is also undeniable that there are likely things you can do to optimize the performance of the Mac you have rather than the Mac you might have someday in the future. That’s what this post will help with. So read on because even if you are planning on adding RAM or a bigger hard drive, there is no sense in using what you already have inefficiently. Read More . . .

The Tired Donkey

The Tired Donkey blogs about cocktails, ways to get the most out of your Mac at home, work, college . . . wherever. He used to write about the unending abuse suffered by the 51% of Americans who actually pay the federal income tax. But this became too depressing, and, frankly, no one wanted to read it.

Nevertheless, if you came here looking for the Tired Donkey's brilliant analysis of our dim-witted tax system, you can still find his earlier posts. Just check the archives or the Site Map.

Note: The Tired Donkey is not advertiser supported, and he gets no benefit from any product mentioned on his site.